EZ Surety Bonds has a need for speed, which it meets with the help of RingCentral Office and Glip.

Through the EZ Surety Bonds website, any business or professional can instantly purchase any of several common license and permit bonds and download an electronic copy. The entire process takes about six minutes, says founder and CEO, Lamon Warnock. “There is no other site in the nation where that happens.”

Higher risk, higher value bonds require manual underwriting, but Warnock strives for efficiency. Where competitors take two or three days to respond to a request, he gets back to customers with a price within the hour. That is where RingCentral Office and Glip have proven valuable.

“One of key components of making it work is the ability to communicate effectively with employees,” Warnock says. That means tight coordination across his team, including remote workers or employees checking in from their phones. Since 2014, when he relaunched his insurance with this exclusive focus, the staff has grown from two to ten employees. Business has doubled over the past year, into the millions of dollars in written surety premiums.

Warnock initially subscribed to RingCentral Office for its cloud-based phone service. That became doubly important when he began adding remote workers. “We can transfer a call to South Georgia, and the client never knows we’re not all in the same office,” he says.

RingCentral Glip magnified the advantage, allowing employees to exchange a steady stream of communications that don’t require a phone call but are too immediate for email. Glip is a team messaging and productivity platform, included with RingCentral Office.

“The problem we find with email is there is a delay—and often nobody notices,” Warnock says. “With Glip, you hear the ding and that tells you, hey, you’ve got something to check out, which you need to look at right away. It allows us to run faster.” In addition, Glip’s built-in productivity tools allow him to track important tasks such as manual underwriting of high-value bonds through every step of the approval process.